Mary Coughlan is the new minister for education replacing Batt O’Keeffe. There has been some furore over this appointment, as Coughlan hasn’t exactly shone in her role as Tanaiste. Whilst Batt O’Keeffe’s tenure in the role of education minister will probably be best remebered for the savage cuts on special education and disadvantage in the … Read more
The NCTE have changed their filtering for broadband connections. This means that schools will now be able to access essential web sites such as YouTube and blogs. This will be welcome news to teachers who have had to download good YouTube clips to USB keys before showing them to their class. The new filtering now … Read more
The West Liffey INTO branch have launched a Facebook page, “Teachers Talking Back”, to inform branch members of media reports from the INTO. A spokesperson from the branch said: We’re always on the lookout for ways to engage with the teachers who don’t come to INTO meetings because we feel they get their information via … Read more
My friend has sent me 3 more picture books for infants. They are based on the theme of “An Aimsir”. Click here to download them as a zip file
There are now 24 different interactive whiteboards available in Ireland being sold by lots of different companies. It’s getting quite saturated out there. Last time I did the review, I was pondering on the implications of Promethean’s new distributors Westcoast. Prim-Ed were beginning to focus on two boards – the Genee Board and the Hitachi … Read more
It took me ages to think of a headline for this. In case you haven’t heard, one of my favourite web 2.0 tools is going through some legal difficulties with regards to its name. Wordle.net is (or was?) a tool for creating lovely word clouds. We, as teachers, quickly saw the educational benefits and used … Read more
The March 2010 Interactive Whiteboard review will be published on Friday, March 5th at 12pm. There are 24 IWBs now reviewed on the list and there are a number of changes since November 2009.
The great thing about blogging compared to, for example, print media is that if you write something that’s inaccurate, you can go back and make changes. My first impression of the Traceboard when I met it two years ago was that it was a Smartboard clone. I gave it a fairly average review and it … Read more
Last night was the beginning of the first CESI conference outside of Dublin in years. As is now the norm, it began with a TeachMeet in the Heritage Hotel in Portlaoise. As my wife and I checked into the hotel, we bumped into one of the organisers, he was panicking in a good way. They … Read more
Although arranged by the Second Level Support Service, some talks are being held later this month about co-operative learning. It may be useful to some of you. Application forms, etc. can be found on the SLSS web site. Here’s the press release: We are delighted to announce details of our forthcoming Cooperative Learning conferences in … Read more